Things have seemingly come full circle.
Bishop Evtikhy [Kurochkin]of Ishim and All Siberia, as was his title under Rocor, was against rapprochement between his new Church and the MP in years leading up to the massive onslaught of MP propaganda to lure Rocor into joining it.
Then, suddenly Bp Evtikhy wrote an overly emotional, longwinded explanation of his personal supposed spiritual experience which like the hand of Heaven woke him up to the correctness of that union. I remember that florid sermon which wandered all over and never seemed to get to any point.
The MP obligingly found a slot for him as Bishop of Domodedevo, a vicar of the Moscow diocese, from May 2007 until his retirement in 2012 due to health worries.
Seems to me that now, with the passage of years and calm time for reflection back in his hometown of Ishim, the REAL Bishop Evtikhy has returned. The Moscow Times, never a publication to favor the Church, seized upon something he wrote on the Russian social network VK and gave it full coverage. Now his remarks are causing Putin and MP supporters to blanch :
Bishop Evtikhy serving at St John the Baptist Church, Washington, 2006
"Only recently I publicly expressed my regrets that barriers have arisen in my desire to vote for Putin. The barrier consists in the fact that Vladimir Vladimirovich made a rather snide remark in reference to Peter Arkadievich Stolypin: “We know, we know—there are ‘Stolypin’ railway cars and ‘Stolypin’ neckties.” This was a cheeky, deceitful revival of the Bolshevik cliché, invented by Masons, which was anti-sovereign and transparently false. I was shocked, and expressed my hope that I would hear from the lips of the President some apology for those irresponsible words. But instead of that I read these blasphemous words: “Well, look, Lenin was placed in a mausoleum. How does this differ from relics for the Orthodox, or simply for Christians? When they tell me that no, there is no such tradition in Christianity, well, of course there is—just go to Mt. Athos and see that there are relics there, and we also have holy relics here.”
“If what you consider is light is darkness, then what is your darkness?!” Those are Christ’s words. And I should go against Christ and vote for darkness or advise someone else to do that?! No, no, and no!"
Here is the flabbergasting passage :
"Communist ideology is in fact very close to Christianity. Freedom, brotherhood, equality, fairness. This was all set forth in the Holy Scriptures, it’s all there. And what was the codex for the builders of communism? It was a sublimation, it was simply a primitive citation of the Bible, they hadn’t thought up anything new. Just look, they put Lenin in the mausoleum. But how does this differ from holy relics? For the Orthodox, or simply for Christians? When they say to me, “No, there is no such tradition in the Christian world”—How is there not? If you go to Mt. Athos there are holy relics there. And here there are also holy relics, Sts. Sergius and Herman [of Valaam.—Trans.] Essentially, the regime of those days did not think up anything new. It simply fit what mankind had invented a long time ago into its own ideology."
One could spend much time challenging this point of view which entirely caters to Communists and serves as an excuse to keep the Pit of Heavy Devils intact !
It sounds like Putin believes that 'mankind invented' the Bible and perhaps manufactured the phenomenon of incorrupt Saints ?
Quotations of 1) Bp Evtikhy's outrage and 2) Putin's remarks are translated by Mother Cornelia [Rees]in her article - which takes the other side in defending Putin - on the Pravoslavie site : http://orthochristian.com/110281.html